Difference Between DivX and Xvid

DivX is a very well known video codec that is used in most video and audio recording nowadays. It has become popular, especially in ripping audio and video disc, due to its lossy mpeg-4 compression that allows it to save movies and songs in very small file sizes with very little noticeable loss of quality. It has been created by a company called DivX Inc. and although there have been quite a number of debacles regarding adware and the like, they have been going strong and now have the DivX software available in two versions. One of which is the basic version that is free and the professional version that is for sale. Both versions can play and encode files in divx, and understandably so, the professional version offers a few more options and perks when encoding files.

Xvid on the other hand is a free software published in the GNU General Public License that is also based on the mpeg-4 format. The name Xvid, as you probably know, is just DivX written backwards. This was meant to poke fun at DivX which is the primary competitor of Xvid. Origin wise, Xvid was an offshoot of DivX’s attempt to provide an open source version of its software called OpenDivX. But the program was cut back when the general public began to make improvements that for outperformed the original. Using the last pieces of code that were present when OpenDivX was stopped, Xvid was born.

When we delve into the performance of the two software, we would likely see that Xvid is always on the cutting edge of development, producing greater performance and a lot more options compared to DivX. But this sort of development makes Xvid a little bit more difficult to master for the general public. Though DivX lags behind compared to Xvid, they have the general advantage of being a lot more stable and they are also accepted as the standard especially in hardware that’s capable of playing this format. When encoding video with Xvid, you can still create material that can be played in most set-top DivX players. But the use of the more advanced features of Xvid could create artifacts in the video output and sometimes incompatibilities, making the playback of Xvid videos in DivX players unacceptable.

If you want to have a standardized video format that you can play in most hardware players, then DivX is for you. But when you want to have more advanced options and you only need playback on a PC, then Xvid is the software to try.

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Written by : Ben Joan.
and updated on July 27, 2011

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